About Us

Free State Projects is an exciting take on business and social responsibility. We’re a co-operative with a commitment to helping our communities while sustainably producing products for market. We’re about bringing upliftment and development opportunities to communities when we work together with them. We are hands-on and can-do.

The projects are about enabling people to live more fulfilling lives, helping self-sufficiency develop in the communities we help and generally creating livelihoods for the people involved. We seek to be an enabling framework for other things to hang from, so to speak.

The idea is to create healthy communities by bringing a whole raft of ideas and practicalities to these communities and developing the best mix of them for each community. We believe that working in partnership with us should be an opportunity for growth and development for the person helping as well as for the people they help.

So the goal is to bring a three pillar model of: permaculture inspired sustainable and eco-friendly industrial practice, human potential upliftment and development, and livelihood creation and enjoyment to a group of networked businesses and communities to act as a model for businesses and impoverished communities in South Africa as a whole. We want to show various concepts and ideas in action and help promote their use in other upliftment projects in South Africa.

Most importantly, Free State Projects sees the end of grindstone-like industrial processes and ways of thinking and working as we go forward into the 21st century. We are non-linear, dynamic and fluid and seek to create an ecology of interaction and co-operation that will produce a social and business framework able to sustain and nourish communities for the long term.